Last Thursday we took our first trip into Zhengzhou,

a large city about 1 hours drive from Xinzheng, my new hometown. Xinzheng is considered a rural farming town out here in China, but it actually boasts of about 600,000 people living here. While it has a ton of normal shopping, the prices can be a little high and the variety of items is small. Consequently, a lot of the foreigners and students prefer to go into the much larger Zhengzhou (8 Million Inhabitants ~ the size of New York City) for a greater selection of products and more opportunities for bartering prices down.

One of the things Zhengzhou offers that Xinzheng doesn’t is a far larger number or walk-in clinics, including one that works solely on Job Physicals or Physicals required by Visa Applications. So this past week we were sent into Zhengzhou to visit the clinic to have our physicals for the Permanent Residency. This was really our first major foray outside of the College Campus, since we have been so busy moving in and settling down. It didn’t help that classes were starting last Monday and we had to instantly jump into lesson planning. But all that aside, this was really our first adventure and we soaked up every minute of it. I’ll post more about the physical itself later, but here are a few things we noticed in our drive through the city:

The Traffic is INSANE!

Two lane roads that suddenly have five lanes of cars, scooter and taxis driving down the sidewalks, huge poles holding up the overpasses above suddenly appearing in the middle of a driving lane, no merging lanes, and a complete disregard for any road signs contributes to what seems like absolute chaos. It’s truly amazing that there are not more accidents than we saw. There are NO traffic laws ~ at one point we had a four way corner with cars going from each corner all at the same time, crossing three lanes of traffic in any given direction. The only exception is that you are responsible for everything in front of you. Conversely, you don’t have to look behind you at all, whoever is behind you is responsible for not hitting you. It’s pretty confusing, but they work it out. Makes for a lot of butting into lines.

Crazy Drivers ignoring the lanes

I couldn’t snap fast enough to get the hold picture, but these two lanes meet at the bottom.

It doesn’t help that they tell you how long til the light changes. All the cars just get impatient and jump the light.

2 Responses to “First Trip to Zhengzhou”

My wife knows the Martin’s very well, in fact, her office was in the original Martin factory … a smallish brick home in Nazareth, PA. She ran the Chamber of Commerce there and her office was decorated with some very rare and expensive guitars. She got to meet lots of famous musicians like Eric Clapton, G. Harrison, Willie Nelson, and lots more because when they came to town they wanted to “touch” the rare instruments. She got lots of private concerts because they wanted to play them, but were not allowed to remove them from the office. Clapton came in one day when Mario Andretti was in her office (they were neighbors … my wife and Mario) so Eric played for almost an hour for them on a 1930 OM45 Deluxe which was recently auctioned for around 2 million USD. Her favorite “visitor” was Neil Young because he was so interesting and just hung around and chatted with her staff. I showed her the photo of the Martin store over there and she cracked up laughing and said “Made in the USA.”

Lol, that’s so cool! That would be an awesome job! I would love to hear some of them play, especially on a really great guitar. Some of those just sound so piercing when they are made really well. I was so sad when I had to sell my guitar. Although I admit, I was more of a piano girl. They play a lot over here , so I’m sure the business is booming 🙂 It’s definitely true that some things are the same everywhere you go. It is slightly annoying how many things I paid to bring to China that were made in China. And the things we have made in China that are not for sale here. 🙂